Part 5

“Not at all,” cried she. “How slow you are! No; for the present, even if we do live in New York, I think it best for Margot to keep on living at the school. She’s barely started there. I want her training to be thorough. And while I’m learning as fast as I can, I am not competent to teach her. I know, of course. But I haven’t had the chance to practice. So I can’t teach her.”

“Teach her what?” I inquired.

“To be a lady--a practical, expert lady,” replied Edna. “That’s what she’s going to Miss Ryper’s school for. And when she comes out she’ll be the equal of girls who have generations of culture and breeding behind them.”

“God bless me!” cried I, laughing. “This Ryper woman must be a wonder.”

“She is,” declared Edna. “It was a great favor, her letting Margot into the school.”

“Oh, I remember,” said I. “She couldn’t do it until I got two of the directors of the road to insist on it. But I guess that was merely a bluff of hers to squeeze us for a few hundreds extra.”

“Not at all,” Edna assured me. “You are _so_ ignorant, Godfrey. Please do be careful not to say those coarse things before people.”

“As you please,” said I, cheerfully, for I was used to this kind of calling down. “All the same, the Ryper lady is hot for the dough.”

Edna shivered. She detested slang--continued to detest and avoid it even after she learned that it was fashionable. “Miss Ryper guards her list of pupils as their mothers guard their visiting lists,” said she. “But now she likes Margot. The dear child has been elected to the most exclusive fraternity. Every girl in it has to wear hand-made underclothes and has to have had at least a father, a grandfather, and a great grandfather.” Edna laughed with pride at her own cleverness before she went on. “Margot came to me when she was proposed, and cried as if her little heart would break. She said she didn’t know anything about her grandfather and great grandfather. But I hadn’t forgotten to arrange that. I think of everything.”

“Oh, that was easy enough,” said I. “Your grandfather was a tailor and mine was in the grocery business like father.”

Edna looked round in terror. “Sh!” she exclaimed. “Servants always listen.” She went to the door--we were in the small upstairs sitting room--opened it suddenly, looked into the hall, closed the door, and returned to a chair nearer the lounge on which I was stretched comfortably smoking.

“What’s the matter?” said I.

“No one was there,” said she. “Haven’t I told you never to speak of--of those horrible things?”

“But Margot----”

“Margot doesn’t know. She must _never_ know! Poor child, she is so sensitive, it would make her ill.”

I lapsed into gloomy silence. I had not liked the way Edna had been acting about her parents and mine ever since we came to Brooklyn. But I had been busy, and was averse to meddling.

“I gave Margot for the benefit of the girls a genealogy I’ve gotten up,” she went on. “You know all genealogies are more or less faked, and I’ve no doubt hers is every bit as genuine as those of half the girls over there. I fixed ours so that it would take a lot of inquiry to expose it. And Margot got into the fraternity.”

“Are the hand-made underclothes fake too?” said I.

“Oh, no. _They_ had to be genuine. I’ve never let Margot wear any other kind since I learned about those things. There’s nothing that gives a child such a sense of ladylikeness and superiority as to feel she’s dressed right from the skin out.”

“Well, school’s a different sort of a place from what it was in our day,” said I. The picture my wife had drawn amused me, but I somehow did not exactly like it. My mind was too little interested in the direction of the things that absorbed Edna for me to be able to put into any sort of shape the thoughts vaguely moving about in the shadows. “I’ll bet,” I went on, “poor Margot doesn’t have as good a time as we had.”

“She’d hate that kind of a time,” said Edna.

I laughed and laid my hand in her lap. Her hand stole into it. I watched her lovely face--the sweet, dreamy expression. “What are you thinking?” said I softly, hopeful of romance--what _I_ call romance.

“I was thinking how low and awful we used to be,” replied she, “and how splendidly we are getting away from it.”

I laughed, for I was used to cold water on my romance. “All the same,” insisted I, “Margot would envy us if she knew.”

“She’d hate it,” Edna repeated. “She’s going to be an improvement on _us_.”

“Not on you,” I protested.

She looked at me with tender sparkling eyes, the same lovely light-brown eyes that had fascinated me as a boy. Brown eyes for a woman, always! But they must not be of the heavy commonplace shades of brown like a deer’s or a cow’s. They must have light shades in them, tints verging toward blue or green. Said Edna: “I’m doing my best to fit myself. And before I get through, Godfrey, I think I’ll go far.”

“Sure you will,” said I, with no disposition to turn the cold douche on _her_ kind of romance. What an idiot I was about her, to be sure! I went on: “And I’ll see that you have the money to grease the toboggan slide and make the going easy.”

She talked on happily and confidingly: “Yes, it’s best to leave Margot another year as a boarder at Miss Ryper’s. By that time we’ll be established over in New York, and we’ll have a proper place for her to receive her friends. And perhaps we’ll have a few friends of our own.”

“Swell friends, eh?”

“Please don’t say swell, dear,” corrected she. “It’s such a common word.”

“I’ve heard _you_ say it,” I protested.

“But I don’t any more. I’ve learned better. And now I’ve taught you better.”

“Anything you like. Anybody you like,” said I. When Edna and I were together, with our hands clasped, I was always completely under her spell. She could do what she pleased with me, so long, of course, as she didn’t interfere in my end of the firm. And I may add that she never did; she hadn’t the faintest notion what I was about. They say there are thousands of American women in the cities who know their husbands’ places of business only as street and telephone numbers. My wife was one of that kind. Oh, yes, from the standpoint of those who insist that business and home should be separate, we were a model couple.

“There’s another matter I want to talk over with you, Godfrey,” she went on.

“That’s a lovely dress you’re wearing,” said I. “It goes so well with your skin and your hair.”

She was delighted, and was moved to rise and look at herself in the long mirror. She gave herself an approving glance, but not more approving than what she saw merited. A long, slim beautiful figure; a dress that set it off. A lovely young tip-tilted face, the face of a girl with fresh, clear eyes and skin, the whitest, evenest sharp teeth--and such hair!--such quantities of hair attractively arranged.

From herself she glanced at me. “No one’d ever think what we came from, would they?” said she fondly and proudly. “Oh, Godfrey, it makes me so happy that we _look_ the part. We belong where we’re going. The good blood away back in the family is coming out. And Margot-- I’ve always called her the little duchess--and she looks it and feels it.” Dreamily, “Maybe she will be some day.”

“Why, she’s a baby,” cried I. For I didn’t like to see that my baby was growing up.

“She’s nearly fourteen,” said Edna. She was looking at herself again. “Would you ever think _I_ had a daughter fourteen years old?” said she, making a laughing, saucy face at me.

I got up and kissed her. “You don’t look as old as you did when I married you,” said I, and it was only a slight exaggeration.

When we sat again, she was snuggled into my lap with her head against my shoulder. She was immensely fond of being petted. They say this is no sign of a loving nature, that cats, the least loving of all pets, are fondest of petting. I have no opinion on the subject.

“What was it you wanted to talk about?” said I. “Money?”

“No, indeed,” laughed she.

“I supposed so, as that’s the only matter in which I have any influence in this family.”

“Come to think of it,” said she, “it _is_ money--in a way. It’s about--our parents.” She gave a deep sigh. “Godfrey, they hang over me like a nightmare!”

Her tragic seriousness amused me. “Oh, cheer up,” said I, kissing her. “They certainly don’t fit in with our stylishness. But they’re away off there in Passaic, and bother us as little as we bother them. The truth is, Edna, we’ve not acted right. We’ve been selfish--spending all our prosperity on ourselves. Of course, they’ve got everything they really want, but--well----”

“That’s exactly it,” said she eagerly. “My conscience has been hurting me. We ought to--to-- It wouldn’t cost much to make them perfectly comfortable--so they’d not have to work--and could get away from the grocery--and the--and the”--she hesitated before saying “father’s business,” as if nerving herself to pronounce words of shame. And when she did finally force out the evading “father’s business,” it was with such an accent that I couldn’t help laughing outright.

“Undertaking’s a good-paying business,” said I. “We certainly ought to be grateful to it. It supplied the eight thousand dollars that gave me the chance to buy half the rolling mill. And you know the rolling mill was the start of our fortune.”

“Do you think father could be induced to retire?” she asked.

“Never,” said I. “Your father’s a rich man, for Passaic. He’s got two hundred thousand at least hived away in tenements that pay from twenty to thirty-five per cent. And his business now brings in ten to fifteen thousand a year straight along.”

“You can make _your_ father retire?”

I laughed. “Poor dad! I’ve been keeping him from being retired by the sheriff. He’s squeezing out a bare living. He’d be delighted to stop and have all his time for talking politics and religion.”

“You could buy them a nice place a little way out in the country, on some quiet road. I’m sure your mother and your old maid sister would love it.”

“Perhaps,” said I. “If it wasn’t _too_ quiet.”

“But it must be quiet. And we’ll induce my father and mother to buy a place near by.”

“Your father’ll not give up the business.”

“I’ve thought it all out,” said Edna, whose mind was equal to whatever task she gave it. “You must get some one to offer him a price he simply can’t refuse, and make a condition that he shall not go into business again. Aren’t those things done?”

I was somewhat surprised, but not much, at the knowledge of business this displayed. “Why!--Why!” laughed I. “And you pretend to know nothing about business!”

She was in a sensible, loving mood that day. So she said with a quiet little laugh: “I make it a point to know anything that’s useful to me. I don’t know much about business. Why should I bother with it? I’ve got confidence in you.”

It was not the first time I had got a peep into her mind and had seen how she looked on everyone, including me, as a wheel in her machine, and never interfered unless the wheel didn’t work to suit her. I laughed delightedly. There was something charmingly feminine, thought I, about this point of view so upside down. “Yes, I guess your father’ll jump for the bait you suggest,” said I. “But why disturb him? He loves his undertaking.”

She shivered.

“And he’ll be miserable idling about.”

“Oh, I guess he’ll get along all right,” said she, with sarcasm and with truth. “He’ll devote himself to suing his tenants and counting his money.... Godfrey, you simply must get those people in Passaic out of our way. I’ve been a little nervous over here, though I knew that none of these dreadful people we associate with has anything better in the way of family than us, and some have a lot worse. Oh, it’s _frightful_ to have parents one’s ashamed of!”

I think I blushed. I’m sure I looked away to avoid seeing her expression. “It’s frightful to be ashamed of one’s parents,” said I.

“Now don’t be hypocritical,” cried she. “You know perfectly well you are ashamed of your parents, as I am of mine.”

“I’ll admit,” said I, “that if they showed up at the office, I’d be a bit upset and would feel apologetic. But I’m ashamed of myself for feeling that way.”

“If you only realized about things,” said she, which was her phrase for hitting at me as lacking in refined instincts, “you’d not be ashamed of yourself, but would frankly suffer. They are a disgrace to us.”

“They’re honest people, well meaning, and as good as the best in every essential way,” said I. “Believe me, Edna, the fault isn’t in them. It’s in us. Suppose you found some day that Margot was ashamed of you and me.”

“But she’ll not be,” retorted Edna. “I for one will see to it that she has no cause to be anything but proud.”

I couldn’t but admit that there were two sides to the problem of our parents. It was shameful to be ashamed of them. But it was also human. I couldn’t--and can’t--utterly damn in Edna a fault, a vulgar weakness, I myself had, and almost everyone I knew. No doubt, gentle reader, you are scandalized and disgusted. But one of my objects in relating this whole story is to scandalize and to disgust you. You have had too much consideration at the hands of writers--you and your hypocritical virtues and your hysterical nerves. If you are an American, you are probably far in advance of your parents in worldly knowledge, in education, in every way except perhaps manly and womanly self-respect. For along with your progress has come an infection of snobbishness and toadyism that seems in some mysterious way inseparable from higher civilization. So be shocked and disgusted with Edna and me, and don’t turn your hypocritical eyes inward on your own secret thoughts and actions about your own humble parents. Above all, don’t learn from this horrifying episode a decenter mode of thinking and feeling--_and_ acting.

“We must get them out of the way before we move to New York,” said Edna. “Ever since Margot began at Mrs. Ryper’s I’ve been on pins and needles. You don’t know how malicious fashionable people are. Why, some of them who have nothing to do might at any time run out to Passaic and see for themselves.”

Edna was sitting up in my lap, gazing at me with wide harassed-looking eyes. I burst out laughing. “They might take a camera along, and get some snapshots,” I suggested.

Edna’s face contracted with horror and her form grew limp and weak. “My God!” she cried. “So they might. Godfrey, we must attend to it at once.”

III

I have never been able to come to a satisfactory verdict as to the intelligence of the human race. Is it stupid, or is it, rather, sluggish? Is it unable to think, or does it refuse to think? Does it believe the follies it pretends to believe and usually acts upon, or is it the victim of its own willful prejudices and hypocrisies? Never have I decided that a certain man or woman was practically witless, but that he or she has confounded me by saying or doing something indicating shrewdness or even wisdom.

The women are especially difficult to judge. Take Edna, for example.

It was impossible to interest her in anything worth while. But as to the things in which she was interested, none could have thought more clearly or keenly, or could have acted with more vigor and effect. I have often made serious blunders--inexcusable blunders--in managing my own affairs. To go no further, my management of my family would have convicted me of imbecility before any court not made up of good-natured, indifferent, woman-worshiping, woman-despising American husbands. Yes, I have made the stupidest blunders in all creation. But I cannot recall a single notable blunder made by Edna in the matters which alone she deemed worthy of her attention. She decided what she wanted. She moved upon it by the best route, whether devious or direct or a combination of the two. And she always got it.

You may say her success was due to the fact that her objects were trivial. But if you will think a moment, you will appreciate that a thing’s triviality does not necessarily make it easy to attain. As much energy and skill may be shown in winning a sham battle as in winning a real. Still, I suppose minds are cast in molds of various sizes, and one cast in a small mold can deal only with the small. And I guess that, from whatever cause, the minds of women are of diverse kinds of smaller molds. Perhaps this is the result of bad education. Perhaps better education will correct it. I do not know. I can speak only of what is--of Edna as she is and always has been.

Having made up her mind to fell the genealogical tree, that an artificial one might be stood up in its place, she lost no time in getting into action.

It was on the Sunday following our talk--the earliest possible day--that she took me for the first visit we had made our parents in nearly three years. We had sent them presents. We had written them letters. We had received painfully composed and ungrammatical replies--these received both for Edna and myself at my office, because she feared the servants would pry into periodically arriving exhibits of illiteracy. We had written them of coming and bringing Margot with us. We had received suggestions of their coming to see us, which Edna had evaded by such excuses as that we were moving or that she or Margot was not well or that the cook had abruptly deserted. The world outside Passaic was a vague place to our old fathers and mothers. Their own immediate affairs kept them busy. So with no sense of deliberate alienation on their side and small and mildly intermittent sense of it on our side, the months and the years passed without our seeing one another.

Edna announced to me the intended visit only an hour before we started. It was a habit of hers--a clever habit, too--never to take anyone into her confidence about her plans until the right moment--that is, the moment when execution was so near at hand that discussion would seem futile. At a quarter before nine on that Sunday morning she said:

“Don’t dress for church. This is a good day to make that trip to Passaic.”

“We’ll go by Miss Ryper’s for Margot,” said I. “How the old people will stare when they see her!”

Edna looked at me as if I had suddenly uncovered unmistakable evidence of my insanity. Then I who had clean forgot her foolish notions remembered. “But why not?” I urged. “It will give them so much pleasure.”

“Trash!” ejaculated she. “They don’t care a rap about her. They can’t, as they’ve not seen her since she was a baby. And Margot would suffer horribly. I think it would be wicked to give a sweet, happy young girl a horrible shock.”

This grotesque view of the effect of the sight of grandparents upon a grandchild struck me as amusing. But there was no echo of my laughter in the disgusted face of my wife. I sobered and said: “Yes, it would give her a shock. We’ve made a mistake, bringing her up in that way.”

“Too late to discuss it now,” said Edna.

“I suppose so,” I could not but agree. “I guess the mischief’s done beyond repair.”

Said Edna: “Have you any sense of--of them being _your_ father and mother?”

“Rather,” said I. “My childhood is very vivid to me, and not at all disagreeable.”

“It seems to me like a bad dream--unreal, and to be forgotten as quickly as I can.”

She said this with a fine, spiritual look in her eyes, and I must say that Edna, refined, delicately beautiful, fashionably dressed, speaking her English with an elegant accent, did not suggest fusty-dusty, queer-looking Weeping Willie with his hearse and funeral coaches, his embalming apparatus and general appearance of animated casket, nor yet fat, sloppy Ma Wheatlands, always in faded wrappers and with holes cut in her shoes for her bunions.

“Wear your oldest business suit,” said Edna, coming back to earth from the contemplation of her own elevation and grandeur. “I shall dress as quietly as I dare. We mustn’t arouse the suspicions of the servants.”

Edna’s fooleries amused me. I didn’t then appreciate the dangers of tolerating and laughing at the bad habits of a fascinating child. If I had, little good I’d have accomplished, I suspect. However, I got myself up as Edna directed, and when I saw how it irritated her I stopped making such remarks as: “Shall I wear a collar? Hadn’t I better sneak out the back way and join you at the ferry?” I should have liked to get some fun out of our doings; that would have taken at least the saw edge off my feelings of self-contempt. I am not fond of hypocrisy, yet for that one occasion I should have welcomed the familiar human shamming and faking in such matters. But Edna would put the thing through like one of her father’s funerals. As we, in what was practically disguise, issued forth, she said loudly enough for the cocking ear of a maid who chanced to be in the front hall:

“Anyhow, the country dust won’t spoil these clothes. I’m so glad it’s clear. How charming the woods will look.”

Just enough to deceive. Edna expanded upon her cleverness in never saying too much, because saying too much always started people, especially servants, to thinking. But she abruptly checked her flow of self-praise as we seated ourselves in the ferry and she looked about. There, not a dozen seats away, loomed our cook! Yes, no mistake, it was our Mary, “gotten up regardless” for a Sunday outing.

“Do you see Mary?” said my wife.

“She’s the most conspicuous female in sight,” said I. “She’s a credit to us.”

“I must have been mad,” groaned Edna, “to give her a holiday! Always the way. I never do a generous, kind-hearted thing that I don’t have to pay for it.”

“I don’t follow you,” said I.

“She hates us,” explained Edna. “Cooks--Irish cooks--invariably hate the families they draw wages from. She’s dogging us.”

“Nonsense,” said I. “She probably hasn’t even seen us.”

But Edna was not listening; she was contriving. “We must let her leave the boat ahead of us. Pretend not to see her.”

I obeyed orders. In the Jersey City train shed we, lagging behind, saw her take a train bound for a different destination from ours. Much relieved, Edna led the way to the Passaic train. Hardly were we seated when in at the door of the coach hurried our Mary, excited and blown. She came beaming down the aisle. Edna saluted her graciously and calmly.

“I got in the wrong train,” said Mary. “It’d never have took me nowheres near my cousin in Passaic.”

Edna’s composure was admirable. Said I, when Mary had passed on, “Now what, my dear?”

“You see she _is_ dogging us,” replied Edna. “I’ve not a doubt she knows all about us.”

“I don’t _think_ she’s got a camera,” said I. “Still, they make them very small nowadays.”

“We shall have to go on in the train, and return home from the station beyond,” said Edna.

“Do as you like,” said I. “But as for me, I get off at Passaic and go to see the old folks.”

“Please stop your joking,” said Edna. “If you had any pride you couldn’t joke.”

“I am serious,” said I. “I shall go to see mother and father.”

“No doubt her cousin lives in the same part of the slums,” said Edna. “Oh, it is _hideous_!”

I don’t know what possessed me--whether a fit of indigestion and obstinacy or a sudden access of sense of decency as I approached my old home. Whatever it was, it moved me to say: “My dear, this nonsense has gone far enough. We will do what we set out to do.”

“Not I,” said Edna.

“Then I’ll drop off at Passaic alone, and hire a trap, and give Mary a seat in it as far as her cousin’s. I’m not proud of my parents, the more shame to me. But there’s a limit to my ability to degrade myself.”

Edna and I had not lived together all those years without her learning the tone I use when I will not be trifled with. She did not argue. She sat silent and pale beside me. When the train stopped at Passaic she followed me from the car. Mary descended ahead of us and moved off at as brisk a pace as tight corsets and stiff new shoes would permit, in a direction exactly opposite that we were to take.

“Aren’t you glad we didn’t go on?” said I, eager to make it up.